LOS ANGELES — The sharpest line of the World Cup’s opening week was not scored on a field. It was delivered on a pregame set by Clint Dempsey, aimed at a coach who used to wear the same crest he did. “Stay in your own lane,” the former United States captain said of Canada manager Jesse Marsch. “It looks like he’s in a dang moped.”
The feud started with patriotism, which is usually where these things start. At a press conference on Thursday, Marsch praised his Canadian players for singing the national anthem and belting it “to the top of their lungs,” and contrasted them with his old employer. “In the U.S.,” he said, “sometimes we had to beg players to sing the national anthem.” Marsch would know the building he was talking about; he spent 2010 and 2011 as an assistant on Bob Bradley’s USMNT staff before a coaching career took him to Salzburg, Leeds and now the Canadian bench.
Dempsey was handed the quote on Friday, on Fox’s set before Canada’s opener, and he did not reach for diplomacy. “I’m not going to take advice from someone who switched to the other side,” he said, “and is singing another country’s national anthem.” That is the whole argument in one sentence: an American who now coaches Canada is in no position to lecture the United States about loyalty, and a man who once stood for the anthem Dempsey stood for has, in the most literal sense, changed which one he sings.
Dempsey did not stop at the principle. “Worry about your own team,” he added, before the moped line that did the real damage. He also, almost as an aside, undercut the premise: his own pregame routine, he said, was to say a prayer, not to sing, which is a quiet reminder that not singing the anthem and not respecting it are different things, and that Marsch’s old gripe may have been thinner than it sounded.
It is, on its face, a small thing, the kind of manufactured controversy a long tournament generates between actual matches. But it lands on a nerve because of who is involved. Marsch’s Canada side opened with a hard-earned draw against Bosnia on the same day, and his decision to needle his former country on the eve of the United States’ own opener was either a motivational gambit or an unforced error, depending on how the next two weeks go.
For the Americans, the timing is its own subplot. Mauricio Pochettino’s team closed its preparation with a narrow loss to Germany and opens against Paraguay carrying the weight of a home World Cup. Dempsey, the most combative attacker the program has produced, is exactly the figure its fans would want firing back, and his willingness to do it on live television gave a restless build-up a jolt of the old USMNT chip-on-the-shoulder energy.
What none of it settles is the only thing that will matter in a month: which of these teams, the host or the co-host, actually does something at this World Cup. Marsch has a point to prove against the country that never gave him its top job. Dempsey has a microphone and a grudge and no team to answer for. The cleanest reply to all of it would be a deep run by either side, and the messiest would be both of them going home early, the anthem argument outliving the football. For now, the moped is winning.
